Alan Lomax must be accorded great respect for his contribution in the popularization of American folk music...as well as other places. His intuition for folk music was extraordinary and could find wonderful traditional performers and give them a platform.

His big problem came in that his scholarship was limited by his little musical knowledge.
He knew the world of his collecting but not the big picture. The point I make is that he could find traditional talent but that there is an overlapping from folk to art music that is sometimes hard to separate. It depends on the material as well as the performance.

Cantrometrics (sp?) was a noble idea but a flawed one. Why? Because it doesn't consider dynamics, interpretation, individuality of the performer, overlapping styles and leads to a host of generalizations about the music and the people who performed it. I think its value lies in the continuity of the music. Singing styles can be traced to some degree from early
forms to later more complex forms showing similar patterns graphically. But it needs to be considered as an important tool to understanding folk music.

Alan was an important figure for his passion, hard work in elevating the appreciation for folk music and influencing other folklorists and ethnomusicologists. No one person can know everything about a given subject and academicians are right to question Alan's ideas.

I would like to say that I think that the contributions of his sister Bess Lomax Hawes are equally important to Alan's. She is extremely knowledgeable about folk music on many different levels and is a good musician on top of it.

With respect to doing research on a paper, there are prominent folklorists and musicologists to read and study. Ken Goldstein of Penn U., Archie Green (Only a Miner) is a classic folksong book, Jean Ritchie is highly knowledgeable and a traditional source, Jean Thomas, Bascom Lamar Lunsford, Dorothy Scarborough,Sam Hinton, Charles Seeger ...these are mostly Anglo-American sources but there are many important Afro-American sources as well. Zora Neale Hurston as an example .(I've just mentioned the tip of the iceberg).

One caveat....Folklore and folkmusic scholarship is not rocket science and is prone to error. Academic folklore study runs the danger of being folklore itself. Ya' gotta' keep digging and you may never find the complete mother-lode.

Frank Hamilton